ForestValue - Management for multifunctionality in European forests in the era of bioeconomy

Forests are crucial for regulating climate, sequestering, and storing carbon, and halting biodiversity loss. Forests also play a crucial role in providing a diverse range of products, facilitating the substitution of fossil resources in the bio-based economy, and offering spaces for recreational activities. Therefore, forests are subject to various and often conflicting societal demands, which has led to a range of distinct policy responses and management paradigms. In addition, these forest-related issues are typically addressed through separate sector policies that often possess conflicting objectives and utilize different instruments. As a result, the implementation of these policies lacks coordination, and the impacts are not consistently monitored. The lack of coordination among disparate sector policies can lead to sustainability losses. Therefore, the MultiForest project aimed to address this issue by promoting integrated and harmonized approaches to forest management. In this project, we analyzed quantitatively the impacts of policies and management practices to gain new insights into forest policy, forest management, and land-use planning. Additionally, we developed large-scale forest programs that can be designed to maintain or increase timber production while also ensuring forest multifunctionality. MultiForest-project has conducted four country-specific case studies (Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden) on how the current sectoral policies cause incoherence between diverse forest functions and how to improve the interaction between diverse policy goals. Our research findings demonstrated that: · Forests play a significant role in mitigating climate change by sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing carbon in trees and timber products while maintaining soil carbon stock. However, it is important to avoid placing excessive emphasis on forests and their resources (such as wood and bioenergy) solely for the purpose of climate change mitigation. Overemphasizing this aspect can lead to conflicting expectations and have negative long-term consequences for other essential ecosystem services and biodiversity. To ensure a sustainable approach, we must recognize the limitations of relying solely on forest resources to achieve mitigation targets and societal decarbonization goals. · Diversifying forest management approaches can help alleviate these trade-offs between different ecosystem services. To resolve conflicts between different policies, allocating the forest landscape into specific areas with defined management objectives is essential. This requires carefully defining objectives at the landscape level during forest management planning, and considering land-use policies. It is also crucial to collaborate closely with landowners and stakeholders to ensure successful implementation. · Policy planning should include a comprehensive and transparent analysis of the interactions and trade-offs between various forest ecosystem services. Ignoring the trade-offs between policy objectives can result in unpredictable policy implementation. Our findings reveal that the current state of the forest at both stand and landscape levels, determines its potential for future multifunctionality. · To successfully meet the targets of the EU biodiversity strategy, it is important to carefully assess how the 10% / 30% objective for strictly protected forests and closer-to-nature management is distributed. This consideration can be made at the EU level, within individual countries, or even at a local level. Our research demonstrates that if the objectives of the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 are shared fairly among countries or implemented with greater detail it would be possible to achieve these targets without significant negative impacts on timber production, both within the EU and globally. In summary, through the Multiforest project, we show that it is crucial to promote collaboration among different policy domains to enhance policy coherence. Additionally, it is imperative to establish and execute ambitious biodiversity policies across Europe to safeguard the sustainability of ecosystems. Last but not least, European countries should develop strategies that facilitate diversified forest management, ensuring the preservation of multiple ecosystem services at the landscape level.

The project's results contribute to the integration of forest policy, practice, and ecosystems at the national and cross-sectoral levels, ensuring sustainable and resilient multifunctionality. Potential outcomes: We translated national-specific forestry policy documents into quantitative policy scenarios in terms of demand for timber, wood-based products, and other ecosystem services such as biodiversity and forest ecosystem resilience. The project made use of these EU-level policy documents for climate change mitigation and provided the different study sites with the timber demands estimations under different climate mitigation targets, calculated simultaneously using the global model GLOBIOM. This allowed us to have more cohesive, and hence more comparable, projections for the different study sites. We created a common understanding of management across study sites, keeping in mind still the practices in each country. This helped for instance to better understand under which policies forest management should e.g., intensify or extensively. In addition, our business partner FinnOpt created the forest management optimization tool, with active input from all partners with study sites (Bavaria, Norway, Sweden, and Finland). The tool can be used across forest systems in Europe and Beyond and it has been instrumental in the project. We brought together the descriptions of the various ecosystem services that each study site was able to calculate and that were relevant to forest policies. We noticed that most sectoral policies acknowledge multifunctionality and aspects of forests outside of their own domain. However, multifunctionality showed to be in most sectoral policies rather than a statement of intent than a concrete objective to be implemented. Consequently, we evaluated how policy coherence appears in the current policies and suggested means of enhancing the policy coherence between sectors and scales to improve the prospects of multifunctionality. Impacts: Our project's results provided a solid foundation for cross-sectorial and cross-scale policy integration, which can secure resilient and sustainable multifunctionality in forest policy, practice, and ecosystems. By analyzing the impact pathways contributing to multifunctionality and by measuring the benefits and losses of different policies and practices, we have generated a knowledge base for European and national decision-makers, that can be applied in endeavors to improve coherence and integrate forest, bioeconomy, and biodiversity policy. In addition to making a high scientific impact through disciplinary and multidisciplinary publications, our project generated direct policy impact through the engagement of stakeholders and by developing a policy brief (already published) on policy coherence.

Forests are subject to various, often conflicting societal demands. Consequently, securing the multi-functionality of forests is a key challenge in transforming the global economy from non-renewable raw material dependence to a sustainable forest-based bio-economy. To develop policies and management practices to better account for the potential trade-offs between various social, economic and ecological contributions, a systematic analysis of both national and EU policies on the forest-sector, and their quantitative impacts on multiple forest functions is required. Earlier research has investigated conflicting forest and environmental policies mainly from the governance point of view with limited focus on the quantitative effects of the incoherence of impacts of policy-mixes on forest functions. Moreover, little is known how management practices and policies can foster resilience of forest ecosystems and production systems. By combining environmental modelling and policy research this proposal provides novel insights to forest land-use planning. We analyse and develop forest practices that can simultaneously maintain or increase timber production and the resilience of forest multi-functionality. We develop new methodologies for assessing multifunctionality in regional and national scales, quantify possible policy conflicts, and develop tools to support resolving socio-ecological land-use conflicts to help European countries taking global leadership in sustainable land-use